Lasipalatsi Square

Three architecture students designed a temporary pavilion in 1936 for Olympic crowds that would never arrive. Built in six months for the 1940 Helsinki Games, the Glass Palace was intended to be demolished afterward, which is the kind of plan that assumes history will cooperate. It did not. Tokyo withdrew from the Games due to war with China. Helsinki lost its turn after the Soviet invasion of Finland. The Olympics went unplayed, and the building that was never meant to last became the one thing Helsinkians refused to demolish.

Lasipalatsi had, in the intervening decades, been a cinema complex, a military headquarters, a bus station, and several other things that its architects, Niilo Kokko, Viljo Revell, and Heimo Riihimäki, had not specified in the original brief. It faced demolition threats in the late twentieth century with the same outcome as before: it survived. When the Amos Rex museum opened beneath the square in 2018, 13,000 cubic meters of rock were excavated to protect the functionalist building above rather than replace it. The undulating concrete mounds now bubbling up from the plaza are skylights, through which contemporary art exhibitions are visible six meters underground, which is a reasonable solution to the problem of a temporary building that has become permanent.

The Glass Palace remains, as it always has been, optimistically transparent and structurally improbable. Three students built it in half a year. It has now lasted nearly ninety. Kokko, Revell, and Riihimäki are not household names in the way that Alvar Aalto is a household name, but they built something he did not: a building that survived by accident, twice.